


Sloan

by DepressedDaisy



Series: The Newsroom Character Studies [2]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, mentions of Don Keefer/Sloan Sabbith, mentions of Jim Harper/Maggie Jordan, mentions of Will McAvoy/Mackenzie McHale, no beta we die like men, sometime around Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:28:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29205135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DepressedDaisy/pseuds/DepressedDaisy
Summary: Sloan Sabbith is a master at understanding theory, but not always at putting it to practical use.
Series: The Newsroom Character Studies [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2144208
Kudos: 1





	Sloan

Sloan was quite sure she was the smartest person at her job. Not in a cocky way, not even in a promotion way, but just in a factual, self-awareness way. And sure, she had the PhDs and IQ points alone to back it up, but she didn’t just mean intellectually smart. She could claim herself socially inept all day, every day, and mean it – she really was more comfortable with numbers and cameras than people – but that was really more about the execution. In theory, in her head, Sloan found herself picking up more stuff than everyone around her seemed to realize. Maybe it was because, not being that comfortable with talking socially with her friends and coworkers, she had plenty of opportunities to observe them and draw conclusions about their behavior. Given how easily these evaluations came to her and how often she seemed to be right, she supposed she could have gone into Psychology, if the numbers and cold, hard facts of Finance hadn’t drawn her so.

She could take one look at Will and how he acted about the audience and about Mackenzie, and figure out his whole love/attention issues. Just a little bit of watching and interacting with Don and she had his “bad guy” act pinned down. She could realize there was more sexual tension than news going around in their newsroom at any given moment, and everyone else was either in denial about it or ignoring it. Be it Mac and Will – who were so obviously still in love with each other that they really should just get it over with and be together, not like anything was stopping them other than Will’s issues – or Jim and Maggie – who’d twisted themselves into a situation so much more complicated than it ought to be Sloan was getting tired of watching them needlessly hurt each other and other people with it – or her and Don.

Yes, she was perfectly aware it could just be her projecting her own feelings onto Don, but she ( _really_ ) wasn’t stupid. There was something there, chemistry, or sexual tension, or unresolved feelings, or whatever you wanted to call it, that just no one but her (and Mac, if her meaningful stares and not-so-subtle attempts at matchmaking were anything to go by) was picking up on. She also knew that, unlike the other ones, she was actually involved in this situation and ought to do something about it (she tried to do something about the others, too, but had found meddling with her friends’ personal lives usually lead not only to failure, but also to getting shut out) – but see above: social ineptitude. She had no idea how to actually act on those feelings (the only times she’d tried to having been catastrophic failures), and that plus her string of jackass boyfriends she hadn’t judged well at all made it evident that she might be good at figuring out everyone else’s lives in theory, but was even worse practically with her own. Plus, she was well aware Don (and her, too) had his own issues to work out, both with Maggie and himself, and had no interest in messing that up more than it already was. So yeah, maybe she couldn’t really blame Will and Mac for dancing around each other for so many years, or Jim and Maggie for being so emotionally obtuse, or Gary for sleeping with the entire newsroom instead of giving actual commitment a chance – it seemed that she, with her insistence in keeping things platonic with Don, but not being able to help but want more and more to be closer with him, was just as hopeless as the rest of them.

**Author's Note:**

> aka, Sloan Sabbith is really emotionally intelligent, just a disaster in actually doing something with it


End file.
